The technology blog of Neil Thompson

Sometimes technology has a way of surprising and Twitter did that last night.

I have been using Twitter for a while now and whileIam still not a complete convert it is certainly getting much more mainstream acceptance with the likes of Obama, Oprah and Fry all tweeting away. In fact a recent mention on the Oprah show is said to have increased the subscribers by a further one million.

A lot of these new users, the majority I would suspect, are based in the US but there is clearly a strong band of users here in the UK too. Last night for instance one of the top topics (trending topics as they are called on Twitter) was “Pantsman” – you can read my contribution here. This was in reference to last nights Apprentice on the BBC where the candidates had to create a new breakfast cereal and a cartoon character to go with it. Once team chose to have Pantsman as their emblem – it was, to be frank, pants.

Many others thought so too and started to tweet about it which raised it up the trending topics list. Then came the almost inevitable wave of tweets wanting to know exactly what Pantsman was about. Most of these emanated from the States.

What this demonstrated to me was how it is possible to very quickly reach a much wider audience with a very local idea. Sure, this got plenty of publicity on the BBC in the UK but it was quickly spread worldwide by the UK tweets. With a neat idea Twitter clearly has a place in modern marketing which is why you will now find many mainstream companies Twittering including the BBC, GM and Kodak.